Galloway wins libel case

[Mr Creosote]

MP George Galloway has won his High Court libel action against the Daily Telegraph newspaper.

He was awarded £150,000 damages over "outrageous and incredibly damaging" claims he was in the pay of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

The MP for Glasgow Kelvin said in court he deserved "substantial compensation" for the allegations.

His case centred on a series of stories published last April following the discovery of documents in Iraq.

The Telegraph denied libel, claiming that it was responsible journalism.

It also said it was in the public interest for it to publish the contents of the documents on which the story was based.

http://www.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30000-13259169,00.html

(Galloway is a leading critic of the Iraq war, now in the "Respect" party having been thrown out of Labour)

[rooboy]

1. Good for him. n/t

[JI7]

2. good to see this

[McKenzie]

3. grrrreat! The system works.

I'm particularly pleased because the Torygraph has to stump up. Must see what the UK papers are saying about this...heehee it's gonna be fun.

[depakid]

4. At £150,000, the Telegraph got off cheap

If Kerry went after the swift liars, the verdict could well be in the tens of millions.

And their lies weren't even close to this bad....

[Judi Lynn]

5. It's great to see Telegraph getting checked. They had it coming

From the Independent:

......The judge said that the allegations were "seriously defamatory" of Mr Galloway.

They conveyed the following meanings to "reasonable and fair-minded readers":



Mr Galloway had been in Saddam's pay, secretly receiving sums of the order of £375,000 a year.

He diverted monies from the oil-for-food programme, thus depriving the Iraqi people, whose interests he had claimed to represent, of food and medicines.

He probably used the Mariam Appeal as a front for personal enrichment.

What he had done was tantamount to treason.



He said that it was no part of the newspaper's case to suggest that any of these allegations were true, or even that there were reasonable grounds to suspect they were true.

"It was the defendants' primary case that their coverage was no more than "neutral reportage" of documents discovered by a reporter in the badly-damaged Foreign Ministry in Baghdad, but the nature, content and tone of their coverage cannot be so described."
(snip/...)

http://news.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=588901&host=3&dir=60

[ze_dscherman]

6. Guardian article with further links

http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,14173,1364526,00.html

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

7. Let us remember who owned...

The "Torygraph" at the time of their malfeasance: Conrad Black. A man seemingly hell-bent to outdo Rupert Murdoch.

[ananda]

8. Anyone surprised?

I always thought Galloway was wrongly done by.

Did those Telegraph accusations pass anybody's stinky fishy smell test here?

However.. well.. it's kind of late now. Galloway and the anti-war benchers were virtually squashed when it mattered. Still, I'm glad the guy got vindicated....

Sue

[emad]

9. This Telegraph/Christian Science Monitor story about Galloway

was part of a MI6 sting to nail bent politicians in the US and UK. No1 prime suspect in London is:

ex-Tory leader Ian Duncan Smith ("Never underestimate the determination of the quiet man") whom the Conservatives dumped last year.

When Junior stole the 2000 WH election the first UK politician to get an interview with Rumsfeld was Duncan Smith, who boasted of his long standing intimate conections with him and Paul Wolfowitz. This was much reported in the UK press.

What was NOT reported was that Duncan Smith was interviewed three times by UK's MoD Military Police, once during Thatcher's tenure of No 10, once during Major's and then once again in late 1998. All interviews were regarding his Opus Dei contacts who were pulling strings in the UN via the Papal Pro Nuncio there who enjoys the baffling sinecure of Official Observer. These same contacts were instrumental in navigating policy into implementing the now disastrous oil for food policy under Saddam, which is now the subject of a major corruption investiation.

Ian Duncan Smith also had a mandate from Thatcher to bolster her network of unofficial espionage personnel who were associated with the global banking network of what is now the HSBC giant. But he came a cropper with two major rows with GEORGE GALLOWAY who was also interviewed by Military Police about Opus Dei goings on and who pointed the finger at Duncan Smith.

To cut a long story short, the story that the Telegraph/Christian Science Monitor libelled Galloway with was a sting to reveal the trail leading directly back to Duncan Smith in his capacity as poison cup bearer to Margaret Thatcher.

[Voltaire99]

10. Good on you, George. (n/t)

[Voltaire99]

11. Galloway in today's Guardian: "The real enemies of our state"

"The real enemies of our state are those who have led us into this disaster in Iraq and those in parliament and the media who supported them."

Much the same could be said on this side of the Atlantic.

http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,14173,1364579,00.html